Predictive Analytics

Predictive capabilities for social diffusion processes, for instance to permit early identification of emerging contentious situations, rapid detection of disease outbreaks, or accurate forecasting of the ultimate reach of potentially “viral” ideas or behaviors, are critically important for both national and global security. An enormous volume of security-relevant information is present on the Web, for instance in the content produced each day by millions of bloggers worldwide, but discovering and making sense of these data is very challenging. Detecting and characterizing emerging topics of discussion and consumer trends through analysis of Internet data is also of great interest to businesses. Non-equilibrium social science emphasizes dynamical phenomena, for instance the way political movements emerge or competing organizations interact.

Leveraging Sociological Models for Predictive Analytics demonstrates that sociologically-grounded learning algorithms outperform gold-standard methods in three important and challenging tasks: 1) inferring the (unobserved) nature of relationships in adversarial social networks, 2) predicting whether nascent social diffusion events will “go viral”, and 3) anticipating and defending future actions of opponents in adversarial settings. Significantly, the new algorithms perform well even when there is limited data available for their training and execution.

Early Warning Analysis for Social Diffusion Events documents a new approach to the predictive analytics problem, in which analysis of meso-scale network dynamics is leveraged to generate useful predictions for complex social phenomena. We find that the outcomes of social diffusion processes may depend crucially upon the way the early dynamics of the process interacts with the underlying network’s community structure and core-periphery structure.

Colbaugh R and Glass K, Early Warning Analysis for Social Diffusion Events, 2012

Predictive Non-Equilibrium Social Science argues that predictive analysis is an essential element of non-equilibrium social science, occupying a central role in its scientific inquiry and representing a key activity of practitioners in domains such as economics, public policy, and national security.